An increasing number of companies and other enterprises are reducing their costs by migrating portions of their information technology infrastructure to cloud service providers. For example, virtual data centers and other types of systems comprising distributed virtual infrastructure are coming into widespread use. Commercially available virtualization software such as VMware® vSphere™ may be used by cloud service providers to build a variety of different types of virtual infrastructure, including private and public cloud computing and storage systems, which may be distributed across hundreds of interconnected computers, storage devices and other physical machines. Typical cloud service offerings include, for example, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
In cloud-based information processing system arrangements of the type described above, a wide variety of different hardware and software products are often deployed, many of which may be from different vendors, resulting in a complex system configuration. Handling system management alerts as well as other types of product-specific alerts in such an environment can be particularly challenging.
Under typical conventional practice, alerts from each product or set of similar products may be delivered to an appropriate administrator with associated graphic views such as tables and charts. Different administrators, such as network, storage and server administrators, may receive alerts from different portions of the system, and mechanisms for sharing such alerts among the administrators are very limited.
As a result, these and other conventional alerting arrangements provide insufficient opportunity for the administrators to coordinate provision of appropriate remedial actions for the various alerts generated by products deployed within the system.